Senator Barack Obama has launched a full broadside against a best-selling book
that attacks him as a Muslim-educated radical Leftist filled with "black
rage".

In a 41-page document entitled "Unfit for Publication", the Obama campaign rebuts Jerome Corsi's Obama Nation (a play on "abomination") almost point by point. Its faux book cover carries quotations from Time magazine branding the book, which has shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, as "trash" and "poisonous crap".

The title of the Obama rebuttal is an allusion to Unfit for Command, the book co-written by Corsi that damaged the 2004 Democratic nominee and Vietnam veteran John Kerry by portraying him as a liar and a coward.

Branding Corsi as a "bigoted fringe author" who is peddling "rehashed lies", the Obama campaign lists the numerous factual inaccuracies in the book.

"His is just one of what will likely be many more lie-filled books rushed to print this election cycle, which are cobbled together from debunked Internet sources to make money and advance a partisan agenda," said Tommy Vietor, a campaign spokesman. "We will respond to these smears forcefully with all means at our disposal."

Corsi's book contains little new evidence or original research but draws extensively from newspapers and the internet to highlight lurid theories and pose portentous questions.

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He states that Mr Obama has "extensive connections to Islam" (he is a Christian, though his father was a non-practising Muslim) and suggests that his admitted youthful drug taking may have continued to the present day.

The book is published by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster that specialises in conservative books and is headed by Mary Matalin, a long-time Republican operative and former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney. So far, some 475,000 copies of the book have been printed.

It has become an article of faith among Democrats that Mr Kerry lost to Mr Bush in 2004 because he failed to hit back against lies about his service record on America's Swift Boat patrol crafts in Vietnam. The term "to be Swift-Boated" - meaning to be smeared by Right-wingers - entered the political lexicon.

Mr Obama has been more aggressive in responding to internet rumours, particularly those falsely suggesting he is a Muslim. He has launched www.fightthesmears.com, a fact-checking website, and enlisted Mr Kerry himself to oversee a sister site called www.truthfightsback.com.

He has also learnt from his erstwhile Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, who perfected the art of responding to mildly hostile biographies of her by much more credible authors with full-frontal assaults on their integrity, sometimes even before the book was published.

The Obama campaign has encouraged journalists to report that Corsi posted a string of online comments in 2004 that questioned Mrs Clinton's sexuality.

Last year, Corsi, who has a PhD in political science from Harvard, published a book charging that President George W. Bush was secretly plotting to create a North American Union by merging the US with Canada and Mexico.

The notion that there is a hidden plan for a North American Union is a pet theory of a small band of fervent small-government conservatives.